“The fatal and shocking incidents communities have faced in recent days demonstrate the urgent need to implement and build on existing regulatory safeguards so communities near chemical facilities are protected from chemical disasters. But, instead of protecting workers and families from death, injury, and illness, Trump’s EPA is putting communities at greater risk of harm by weakening the nation’s primary defense against chemical facility incidents. The Risk Management Program (RMP) protects against catastrophic industrial chemical releases, fires, and explosions through preventative safety measures. The Trump administration is attempting to weaken this rule. Every chemical incident, every life lost, and every evacuation is one too many. Each chemical emergency makes clear the need to strengthen, not dismantle, protections against chemical disasters before more workers, families, and communities are harmed.” 

For a year now, the Chemical Safety Board, a small independent agency that investigates chemical spills and other disasters has faced elimination under President Trump’s budget cuts.That hasn’t stopped the board from taking on the Trump administration. The agency is now opposing an attempt to roll back new chemical disaster rules that were introduced under former President Joseph R. Biden and aimed to prevent accidents at thousands of industrial facilities. The Chemical Safety Board has been taking the lead in investigating accidents, including a chemical leak at a plant in West Virginia last month that killed two people. Maya Nye, who grew up about a mile from the plant and whose family was forced to shelter in place as the emergency unfolded, described the accident as one of many over the years across the industrial corridor along the Kanawha River near Charleston, a hub for chemical manufacturing that residents call “Chemical Valley.” “We’ve been kicking and screaming for years calling for improvements, protections under these rules. And now it feels like we’re taking 10 steps back,” said Dr. Nye, who is federal policy director for Coming Clean, a nonprofit organization that advocates for policies to prevent disasters and reduce toxic pollution.

Until last year, one of the best ways to find out if you live near one of the roughly 12,000 facilities that store hazardous, cancer-causing chemicals used in manufacturing products like pesticides or medical devices was to go to an EPA webpage for the Risk Management Program (RMP). There you could type in your zip code in a search tool, and see if any of these chemical factories are nearby. (Latino, Black and low-income people are more likely to bear the brunt of chemical pollution; they disproportionately live closer to chemical plants than other groups.) But last April, the Trump administration took down this tool. Now the only way to get this information is to drive to one of several dozen EPA reading rooms across the country to examine paper records. “You have a right to know what’s in your back yard,” said Maya Nye, federal policy director for Coming Clean, a non-profit environmental health collaborative. She said the removal of the tool is particularly concerning because “we haven’t figured out how to prevent chemical disasters and people are still experiencing them”.

Wayne County, Mississippi, in a quiet southeast corner of the state, is home to about 20,000 people surrounded by forest and farmland. But Wayne distinguishes itself in two ways: it is home to a Sipcam Agro plant that processes the toxic herbicide paraquat. Within the U.S., the plant is the largest single emitter of paraquat. Wayne County also sees high rates of Parkinson’s disease deaths, in the top 7% of all U.S. counties that reported Parkinson’s deaths between 2018 and 2024. Troves of evidence have long linked paraquat to Parkinson’s, the world’s fastest-growing – and incurable – neurodegenerative disease. In March, Syngenta announced it would stop producing paraquat. But Syngenta’s exit doesn’t mean paraquat will stop entering the U.S. Instead, other companies and other facilities – like the one in Wayne County – will fill the gap, likely increasing the amount of paraquat they handle.